THE RUSSIAN-UKRAINIAN WAR (2014-2022): BASIC PRECONDITIONS AND CAUSES

Abstract

On February 24, 2022, the Russian Federation started a large-scale military aggression against Ukraine, moving from covert hybrid to overt war. Ukraine found itself in the epicenter of one of the largest and most extreme socio-cultural rifts of the global world. The aim of the research is to study, analyze and summarize the causal chain and conceptualize the understanding of the nature of the Russian-Ukrainian war in the chronological range of 2014-2022. We consider it necessary to condition the possible change of a certain upper chronological limit (2022). The study is based on dialectical, comparative, international legal and systemic approaches. The basic methods are: analysis and synthesis, synchronic and diachronic, comparative-historical, historical-legal, and structural-functional.

It is proved that the preconditions for the Russian-Ukrainian war emerged from the collapse of the USSR and the first years of modern independent Ukraine. The collapse of the Soviet empire and the communist bloc at the end of the twentieth century was regarded by official Moscow as the greatest tragedy of the twentieth century. Russian President Vladimir Putin and those close to him did not abandon the idea of restoring the imperial structure and lost geopolitical positions, in particular by returning Ukraine under Kremlin’s. At the beginning of the XXI century, Ukrainian-Russian relations became especially acute due to the different attitudes of Kyiv and Moscow towards European, Eurasian and Euro-Atlantic integration, as well as tensions in the security field of bilateral relations. The main reasons for Russia’s war against Ukraine are: geopolitical, imperial, civilization, existential, personal and psychological. In general, from the Russian side, they boil down to a principled denial of Ukrainian statehood. In 2014, Russia actually used the Revolution of Dignity as an excuse for the annexation of Crimea and a hybrid war against Ukraine. The reason for the conventional Russian-Ukrainian war of February 24, 2022 can be seen as the Kremlin's desire in the year of the centenary of the formation of the USSR to revive Russian influence in the post-Soviet space, which implied mandatory full control over Ukraine or its absorption.